WRITER

New One-Act Play: "Stand Yer Ground!"

This is a play I’m going to pitch to theater producers far and wide in the hopes that it might get produced off Broadway (like in some cool art space in Brooklyn, or even a grade school gymnasium in Alaska if necessary).

The story is of a "lovable loser" type who, on the verge or turning 50, is desperate for something – anything – to pull himself out of his mid-life funk. With no money, no car, no job, and no hope, he's in need of an inspiration, which he receives unexpectedly one cold January day. Ambling aimlessly through the streets of Boston by himself and fantasizing about being enveloped in the warm sunshine of a Florida strip mall, he steps off a curb and nearly gets run over by a bunch of lunatic Mongolian tourists using "Hubway", the Boston bike share program. They come screaming by laughing their collective asses off on the clunky bikes, scattering Canada geese and sending old ladies for cover. And that’s when our hero (need to give him a cool character name, such as “Ted Nugent”) gets the great idea he’d been looking for his whole life: start a gun share program to protect people like himself from cackling Mongolian tourists.

Of course, officials in Massachusetts are all up in arms because recent studies suggest gun-sharers are less likely to keep guns cleaned and oiled up than gun owners – so he takes his idea down to open-minded and sunny Florida. The next thing you know, he’s opened his first gun share kiosk so Floridians are able to stand their ground when confronted with bike-riding Mongolian chortlers.

A friend pointed out that Florida as yet has no bike share programs and precious few Mongolian tourists, so savvy producers who aren't asleep at the wheel might just question this story’s verisimilitude. For this reason, I’m considering rewriting the ending such that "Ted Nugent" opens the kiosk at a sleek new movie theater so that people can stand their ground in popcorn lines.

Question: who are the villains in this story, Massachusetts officials or guffawing Mongolians on their clunky bikes?